On this day, remember all of those who died, because in the end, they died believing.

He had just turned 22. Young and eager, but anxious about being what he most wanted to be, a leader of infantrymen. So he and some of his friends approached me. "Captain, can you teach us?" This was at West Point, where in theory they were already getting the best education the nation could provide. "Teach us what we need to know to be good infantrymen." And so I tried. We would meet once or twice a week over coffee and Cokes in MacArthur Hall, in the vanishingly small and precious moments of time the cadets had for themselves when they were free of the demands of the Academy. That time they chose to waste in listening to me. I would teach them what little I knew about leading men and life leading infantrymen. I would not teach them enough.

Most Popular

He was 54. Silver-haired with a crew-cut. We would smoke together in the central courtyard of the Pentagon. We would laugh and tell stories and half-lies to each other, the way friends do. He knew I was not long back from Iraq, from the very unit he was headed to in weeks, so then we talked about that. About the places and people and the things he would see that I was still trying to forget. I would sketch out maps for him on napkins as we shared a lunch. "You can go here, but don't ever fkin' go there, and this spot here is where you will live." I told him all that I knew. I did not tell him enough.

She was roughly my age. Tired but hopeful, she wanted a nation where her tiny son and young daughter might grow up in peace. She was a fan of cheesy American hair bands, which is how she started learning English. She was my translator, then my interpreter, then my friend. Together we conspired to make life a little more tolerable for the children at a school near where she lived at the moment. I tried to help her get to America. I did not try hard enough.

He was 44. Serious and quiet. We went on missions together into places that were definitely not optimal. We were the only "professors" in the headquarters at the time, aside from the boss. He of philosophy and myself of military history. Our departmental affiliation notwithstanding, we got along. But while I knew him, I did not, unfortunately, know him well enough. One day he and I briefed the boss, just the two of us, in the headman's office. Nineteen hours later his war ended. I did not listen well enough.

They are gone now, all of them, and ten more of my close acquaintance.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Oh why don't I just say it? "Gone." What a stupid nonword for what I am talking about. They are dead.

Killed. Shot through the head, exploded by an IED and deconstituted from their constituent particles, killed by a jagged piece of shrapnel from a rocket or a mortar, or by the bullet from the muzzle of the pistol they put to their own head. It does not matter. They are dead. They are my dead, and I live with them every day. But on this day, which we Americans call Veterans Day but which the Brits do better by calling it Remembrance Day, I ask that you too remember them.

Then I would ask of you the nearly impossible. Remember our enemies. Think of those that my men and my friends and I have tried, so hard and so successfully to kill. They once were alive too, with families and wives and children. Chance brought them, with full conviction, to fight us. We can reason and argue until the sun goes down about the choices that some of them made, or those which their very upbringing made it impossible for them not to make, but they are just as dead now as those on my personal list. Somewhere there is a man like me writing these words in another language.

Remember them for humanity, please, remember them as well. Why they died matters, but it matters less than you might think.

Wilfred Owen was a British officer. He fought in the ridiculously misnamed War To End All Wars, also known as World War I. Between the time when he was blown into the sky by mortars at the age of 22 and when he was shot dead by machine gun fire at 25, he wrote some poetry, the finest bit of which is partially stolen from the Roman orator Horace. It was repurposed by Owen. Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori. Owen had been taught that Patria meant "your country." He called this sentiment, "the old lie." You should read this poem, because it is beautiful, before you read my critique.

..But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
...the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin...

Owen shows us, up close, the inhumanity of war. Then in the final lines he mocks the notion that it is sweet or right to die for one's country. To do this, he repurposes a bit of Latin from the Roman orator Horace:

...The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

See, early in the war, the British government had used Horace to encourage enlistment by appealing to the population's Edwardian sense of duty. In 1917, Owen would have understood, "Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" as something like, "It is beautiful and right that one should die for one's country." Nationalism and propaganda colored Owen's interpretation of Horace, and I appreciate his resentment. But I think Horace's words can be understood differently -- not as an old lie, but as a shared truth.

Pardon, for a moment, my amateur translation of the Latin. It is tinged and informed by history. Dulce roughly means, "correct and/or peaceful/beautiful/sweet." The word "et" is the same now as it was then, "and."

The next word, "Decorum" carries some freight. "Right" and "Proper" is often how it is translated now, but in context it means, I think, "according with the values of your society."

"Est" is merely "is."

"Pro Patria Mori" is a little complex. Pro means "for," and "Patria" is, essentially, your country. Okay, no. That is not exactly right. That is just what Owens was brought up to think that it meant. In reality it sort of means, "The folks what brung you up." Or maybe, "Your peeps."

See, the problem is that the word "patria," as it is often translated, is that the idea of a "country," or a "nation" is a more modern invention than Horace, or any Roman, would have recognized. They did not think in terms of "countries," and so Latin did not have words that talked about what we would recognize as countries. I think Horace would approve of my deconstruction. (No, I am not a Derridean.)

So the sum can be seen, Owen's interpretation of, Dulce et Decorum est," labeled by a man who saw war and called this "the old lie," came out this way: "It is beautiful and right that one should die for one's country." But Wilfred was wrong. That is not his fault. He was a poet, not a historian.

Dulce et Décorum Est, Pro Patria Mori, should be translated this way: "Fighting and possibly Dying for your friends and family to protect and defend them, as you have been taught, is the right thing to do." Nationalism and Propaganda colored Owens' interpretation, and I understand his resentment. Horace had been used by the British government early in the War to encourage enlistment out of a sense of Edwardian duty. That is not Owens' fault, he was reacting to his own nation -- not the actual history.

But even knowing this, the dead march through my dreams. They are my friends, my soldiers, my cadets-turned-officers, my enemies, dead in their many ways, but dead all the same. For the same reason, friend and foe, they are dead. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

And so, today, I ask you to remember them. All of them, because in the end, they died believing.

Nobody could ever approve of these statements, so they are solely that of the author. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.